In the United States, the commercial weather sector provides forecasts, observations, and other meteorological content to businesses and consumers for direct fees and other forms of compensation. There is, at any time, a strong drive for value-added differentiation in this sector, since most of the basic weather forecast and observational data originates from a freely available, public data source—the National Weather Service (NWS).
Weather information vendors attempt to add value to the basic, public-domain database in many ways to distinguish themselves over other vendors. One area in which value-added products and services are being provided is surface weather observations or “Current Conditions.” The NWS along with other public providers like the FAA and DoD produce about 1,400 so-called official surface weather observations each hour (or more frequently, as conditions warrant) in the Continental U.S. (CONUS). Most of the instruments are located near airports or airfields.
One limitation is that there are often considerable distances between reporting stations, especially in the Intermountain West and Northern Plains. If the 1,400 official observing stations were spread evenly over the CONUS, then a single station would represent about 2,000 square miles of land surface; an area of about 45 miles on each side. This is poor resolution for sensing and measuring many weather phenomena such as severe thunderstorms or tornadoes. Such small-scale events are often “invisible” or aliased as a result of the poor spatial and temporal resolution within the official observing network. This can be dangerous in respect to the protection of life and property.
Some private firms have installed low-cost weather instruments that augment the official network of government-provided weather observations. These private “mesoscale” observing networks are often used in concert with internet or wireless device delivery applications, and can provide much more local and timely weather information to a customer as compared to the basic observational data provided by the NWS by filling-in gaps in time and space. This way, customers may be able to receive temperature and other weather information from an observing point that is nearby rather than a distant airport. Moreover, the customer might receive these observations with higher temporal frequency, on demand, or with less time delay than via the generic public data source.
However, there are several problems and limitations with such private networks of weather observing stations. One problem is that the instrument packages are limited, and offer and provide only basic meteorological quantities. These typically include temperature, humidity, rainfall, pressure, wind speed and direction. The automated instrument packages typically do not detect the present weather or type of precipitation (rain, snow, ice, thunderstorm, etc.), nor can they detect important obstructions to visibility such as fog, blowing snow, and blowing dust. The instruments cannot sense the cloud cover, cloud ceilings, or types of clouds. While the instruments may detect rainfall by recording rainfall that falls into some form of rain gauge sensor, they generally fail to record snowfall and other types of measurable precipitation. Worse, if the rainfall sensors become ice or snow-bound, they will stop recording any precipitation over long periods in colder climates.
Another problem with private weather observing stations is that the instrument packages providing the meteorological data are often low-cost, low-quality, and can suffer from significant sensitivity, bias, and calibration problems. Further, these instruments are often poorly sited or installed. For example, to accurately sample the horizontal wind speed and direction, the location of the cup anemometer, wind vane, or other wind recording instrument is crucial. The identification of true north for proper directional reference can be difficult to determine.
For all observational sensors, there exists standard installation and maintenance protocols recommended by the NWS and other agencies. In many cases, these private networks do not comply with such protocols or standards and maintenance of instruments is often neglected. This is especially problematic with mechanical instruments such as wind and rainfall sensors, where regular maintenance by trained technicians is necessary. Depending on the harshness of the climate, sensors and instruments require complete or component-level replacement on a regular basis.
The placement of low-end and incomplete sensor packages does not scale well, and cannot fill the increasing need for a broad network of fine-scale information on current weather conditions. Thus, there is a need for a system that can provide surface weather observations for discrete locations without requiring the addition of costly fixed or in situ sensors for each location. The present invention provides for such a system.